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Life After Weight Loss

In Sex Love and Obesity Part 13 – Peter had just moved in, one of my dearest friends had just passed away and the arguing in our relationship had started escalatingmover differences in our priorities.

June and July are difficult months for me. I have a trouble dealing with the grief of losing my Dad between Father’s Day, the day he passed away, (July 5th) and his birthday on July 20th. That year in particular was harder than normal as I was also grieving and mourning the recent loss of one of my dearest friends.

Starting a new relationship probably would have already been a struggle for me. But starting a new relationship where you’re fighting half the time was taking a toll on my mental health and wellness. I was exhausted and depressed. Working two jobs to try to make ends meet had me beat and worn out. The additional worry of Peter getting close to running out of money before finding a job was escalating my stress levels.

How was I dealing with it all? Well, let’s be honest. I couldn’t turn to food to deal with my feelings, so I was exercising. A lot. I was running a half marathon almost every other weekend. I was putting in 3 hours a day of exercise at the gym with the classes I was instructing. I was coming home at night drinking, smoking cigarettes, smoking marijuana and despite the arguments that were going on, we were having amazing sex on a regular basis.

Sex, drugs, alcohol, and exercise. That is how I was coping.

It was a few days before my Father’s birthday and Peter had just landed one of the most amazing jobs there was to be had. Great pay and medical insurance walking in the door on day one. When he came to the grocery store I worked at to tell me about it, we were both ecstatic. “Start thinking about what kind of ring you want and what kind of house we’re going to be looking for kiddo.” Those were his words.

At that moment, I thought everything was about to turn out the way we had planned. Happily, ever after. I’d stop working two jobs, we’d stop being stressed out and fighting over money. We’d have less to argue about. Things would get better.

The day before Peter was about to start the job I had decided to go out for a morning run around a nearby lake with a friend of mine. He hadn’t been running since we finished our half marathon together, but he did enjoy getting on his bike and going for a ride. He decided to take his bike down to the lake and ride around to check on us.

The lake is a loop mind you. No matter what direction you go in, you’re going to go back to the same place you started from to get back to where you caught the loop. My friend and I typically ran in one direction. But, that morning we decided to go the opposite way.

When Peter caught up with us, he was irritated that we hadn’t gone in the direction he thought we would. He got short with us. He gave me a hard time about it and then took off on his bike in a huff with a “I’m going home.” – To this day, while he would never admit it, my friend and I both believe that had he not been having a little temper tantrum and rode off in a huff as fast as his feet could pedal, what happened next might never have happened.

We got about a mile up the road and stopped to go to the bathroom when a gentleman on a motorcycle stopped us and asked us if one of us had a boyfriend biking around the lake. He proceeded to tell us that Peter had fallen off his bike and was hurt. Luckily, my friend’s car was parked at the parking area we at. We jumped in the car and rushed to find him.

When I got there, the ambulance had just arrived. Peter was laying on the ground. “I think I broke my leg.” I heard those six words and something inside me literally shut down. He told me later that the look on my face when I got there was cold and uncaring. I denied it. I assured him that I was just responding to the situation and trying to make sure that I was dealing with the Paramedics who wanted to move him too much.

That was the first lie I ever told him. He was right. The moment I walked up and saw his foot pointing in the wrong direction I knew he had broken his hip. I knew he had less than a couple hundred dollars left to his name. I knew he wouldn’t be starting that new job tomorrow. I knew there would be no medical insurance to cover whatever costs we’re about to be occurred. I knew that it would be months of recuperation before he would be able to work, and I knew that I was going to have to take care of him physically and financially. We weren’t even two months into a new relationship.

This was way more than I had signed up for.

I argued with the paramedics about how they were going to move him and where they were going to take him. They wanted to stand him up and have him sit down on a gurney. Believing his hip to be broken, I didn’t want them to do anything that caused movement at the hip joint. He got an ambulance ride to the hospital and my friend and I loaded his bike up. We grabbed my car and ran home to walk the dog knowing we might be gone for a while. As soon as we were done we headed over to meet him at the hospital.

He embarrassed me in the emergency room. His phone, which let me just say where Peter is concerned, is like permanently attached to his hip so that he can constantly share every aspect of his life on social media, was about to die and none of us had a charger. I wanted his phone so that I could call the company that he was supposed to start working for and let them know what was going on. I wanted to compose an email to the HR department that might help secure the position before the phone died and I couldn’t get to the contact information. He wanted the phone to post pictures of the situation on Facebook, ask the world for prayers and answer chat messages back and forth asking if he was okay. Again, we had very different priorities and it caused quite a scene in front of my friend when we fought about it.

When they told us that his hip was indeed broken and they were transporting him to a different hospital for surgery, my friend and I told Peter we were going to go get some lunch and we’d meet him at the other hospital. I walked out of the emergency room and broke down in tears. The stress of the entire situation was just too much for me to deal with on top of a grief ridden heart. My friend tried to console me. When I couldn’t calm down she suggested the one thing she knew might help me deal with all the overwhelming emotions. “Come on Pandora, why don’t we go finish our run.”

In this relationship, my running was a source of contention.

I was already constantly being accused of loving running more than I loved him. To this day I have never admitted to him that I left the hospital and went running.

Later, I was verbally attacked for the better part of 20 minutes because I took to long to get to the hospital. He was highly offended that we’d been unthoughtful enough to stop and grab Indian Buffet food rather than going through a drive through and rushing home to get his charging cord and getting back to him before his cell phone died. The buffet really hadn’t taken much time, you grab a plate you put food on it, you eat. It was the run that delayed me 30 minutes. But I needed it emotionally and he would have never understood that.

When we got back to the house I called him to find out where the charging cord was and let him know we were on our way. He freaked out over the word “we.” He let me know under no uncertain circumstances that he didn’t want my friend coming with me. He only wanted me there, nobody else. He wanted to be alone with me. My friend, who had canceled her plans for the day to be there for me, to offer moral support and help us deal with the crisis could hear every word he said.

“Don’t worry about it Pandora, I don’t need to go,” She assured me when it started to cause a fight. He’d just slapped another one of my friends in the face with his lack of appreciation and gratitude. That was two in less than two months.

When I arrive at the hospital, alone, I told him that I was really stressed out and worried about how we were going to pay the bills. We’d had so many arguments over money that we were both acutely aware of the other’s finances. I knew he only had a couple hundred dollars to his name. He knew I was struggling to pay the bills. He also knew I had managed to stash away a little nest egg of a few thousand dollars in a savings account.

That savings account was what I called my “get the hell out of dodge money”. It was the same amount that I had in my savings when I moved to Oregon to be with my husband. It was the same amount I had when I left Oregon and moved to North Carolina to take the new job and be with Superman. It was my “This all went wrong I need an escape plan” money. Someday if things worked out with us, it would have been my part of a down payment on a house money.

“What are we going to do Peter? How are we going to pay all the bills?” his answer, floored me. “I guess we’ll just have to dip into the savings.”

“Oh. You mean my savings?”

This was turning into a nightmare. From where I was sitting, albeit completely unintended on his part, this relationship was turning into every other relationship I had been in. I was stuck with all the financial burden. I was concerned at the huge differences I was seeing in our priorities. I was trying to make responsible decisions. I felt like he was playing the part of the boy that would never grow up. I was unhappy. I was resentful. This had all happened in less than 8 weeks of living together and I was nowhere near capable of dealing with it.

The rose-colored glasses were about to come off. The amazing sex life we had was the glue that was holding everything together. It was the one thing that made me turn a blind eye to everything that was wrong. His broken hip was going make sex a complete impossibility for quite a while.

Without the sex to act as a band-aid in the times that I felt emotionally wounded by him, he was about to lose his ability to use sex as a tool to convince me that were meant to be together. Without the sex as a distraction, I was about to start seeing how dysfunctional and toxic this relationship actually was.

In Sex Love and Obesity Part 12 – Peter had decided to move to North Carolina so that we could begin our life together. It was April now and Peter and I were just about to move in together.

I admittedly wasn’t handling things very well. My life was an emotional roller coaster. I had relapsed into smoking cigarettes again the previous June & July when the grief of Father’s Day and the Anniversary of my Dad passing away rolled around. I was in a cycle where anytime I got stressed, I rushed out bought a pack of cigarettes, chain smoked them all and then quit again. In my mind it was better than stress eating Twinkies and Cheetos.

We had one more trip together planned before he moved in. We were headed back to Disney to do a Half Marathon alongside a couple of my friends.

That trip turned into a bit of a fiasco when I didn’t do everything he wanted.

I am pretty sure we had an argument each day we were there. He’d get upset if I decided to have a drink when he wasn’t having one. He threw a temper tantrum when I snuck an e-cigarette I was using to try to quit smoking again into the bathroom of our hotel room after I had conceded to not used it when he bribed me with the promise of a Tinker Bell Pandora charm he knew I wanted as a “reward”.

He told my friends that I was mean to him and that I wasn’t supportive enough at the finish line of our half marathon. That was probably true. I was frustrated. We had ended up walking the last 6 miles because he had done everything I told him not to do; Not getting enough rest. Drinking alcohol the night before an event. Running faster than he should in the first 5 miles because the adrenaline levels are high and in turn, teetering out on the tail end as a result.

I was angry. He had asked me to re-arrange my entire run schedule so that he could be with me for my 26th half marathon, a number that was monumental to me, because it was important to him that he was a part of that 26th half marathon with me. I had done so to please him. Yet the entire time we were running it was all about him and not at all about me. Never once during the entire event did he even acknowledge that it was my 26th half marathon.

I enjoy taking other people to run their first half marathon. I don’t mind running someone else’s pace with them. But if I had known how this all was going to go down, I definitely would have saved that marathon of marathons for my own race. I ended up resenting him for stealing the thunder of that experience from me. I wasn’t the typical cheerleader and motivator I would have been because of it. He whined about the entire experience to one of my dearest friends at the finish line.

Later that night he told me that my friends were concerned about me and thought I had a drinking problem when we all went out to celebrate together at a fancy Disney dining experience and I had a little too much to drink. Something that to this day, both my dear friends swear they never said.

One of my friends didn’t quite have the happy ending she wanted at the Half Marathon. She was a little embarrassed about it at first and didn’t want anyone to know. We had plans to run a half marathon together a month later. He convinced her that she shouldn’t run with me on our next half together because it would ruin the run for me. Then in a later conversation where she didn’t agree with what he said, he threatened to tell all our friends that she didn’t get the finish time she wanted at the Half Marathon we had all done together and embarrass her.

You’d think, all this would have made me go, wait a second, what the heck is wrong with this guy. But he loved me, and I REALLY wanted someone to love me. He wanted me, and I REALLY wanted someone to want me. We had amazing sex, and my life was just way overdue for amazing sex.

I let it all go and accepted whatever blame was laid on me for how he behaved.

I accepted the excuses, reasons and tireless explanations he gave for why he acted the way he acted and trudged on.

May ended up being a nightmare month in our relationship – perhaps a foreshadowing of things to come. It started with a fight while I was away for a weekend with my girlfriends running the Diva Half Marathon when he berated me for not spending enough time on the phone with him practicing my presentation for an upcoming convention. He really didn’t handle me being on me own and with my friends well at all.

A couple of weeks later I was off to Disneyland to run the Tinker Bell Half Marathon. It was the first Disney trip I was doing without him. I’d had it planned for over 9 months. He knew about it forever. It was an all-girls trip. One of the girls in our group was sharing a time share apartment suite with us and none of us had to pay for the room. But he had never been to Disneyland, he was jealous he wasn’t going, and he made a nuisance of himself the entire time I was there.

We fought until I was in tears. I can’t even remember what we fought over, this sort of thing was quickly becoming our normal. My friend and I were so twisted up about it that we were timid to even go into the park and post photos of it for fear he’d get jealous, get upset with us and have a temper-tantrum about it.

That trip ended with an epic argument when he found out that one of my friends had invited me to go run the Princess Half Marathon with her the following February. He didn’t want me to go on another Disney trip without him. It would be another girls weekend; he didn’t feel like I could afford it, and he was jealous that I had the opportunity to do another Disney run where I didn’t have to pay for a hotel room to go.

When I told him that she had also offered me a spot in her room in Paris for the Inaugural Paris Disney half marathon and I was going to try to do that too, he flipped his lid. We spent the entire evening on the phone fighting with me in hiding in the bathroom crying rather than spending the time with my friends.

I left that trip and headed to Nashville TN for a weight loss convention that I was scheduled to speak at.

On social media, the posts would have made you think that everything was perfect. You would have thought that he was super supportive and ridiculously proud of me.

This is a great example of how when you’re following someone on social media, you’re only reading what someone wants you to know. I wasn’t about to post about what was going on and cause more conflict and more arguments, so I stayed silent about what was happening in the background.

In reality, behind the social media posts, I was getting emotionally sandblasted for securing a sponsorship to Paris that didn’t include him. In private messages our friends were getting an earful of how and why he didn’t want me to go to Paris. Then when he was done talking to them, I was getting emotionally bombarded with how none of our friends thought I should go in an attempt to change my mind about the trip.

I almost told him not to bother moving to North Carolina.

I almost pulled the plug on the entire relationship right then. I felt smothered. I felt controlled. I didn’t like the fact that appeared as though the relationship became volatile anytime I was doing something without him.

But he talked me out of that with reasons and explanations for why he behaved the way he did. Once again, desperate for the love and affection and blinded by the amazing sex, I accepted them.

But it only got worse, and it got worse fast.

Things were already a financial mess for me before he moved in. My hours had been cut drastically at my job starting in the beginning of May and I had taken a second job working as a cashier at a grocery store to try to make ends meet. I was working from 8am to 8pm almost every day. I was stressed out beyond belief, trying not to let anyone see me falling apart, and then just a few days before Peter was supposed to arrive, one of my nearest and dearest friends passed away.

I don’t do grief well. We’ve established this. I came home from work early that day, called in to my second job, and watched Clark pack up the rest of his things to move out of the apartment while I drowned myself in a bottle and chain smoked my way through my emotions.

I had a few days alone in the apartment, only I don’t do alone very well either, so I asked one of my close friends to come over. We decided to have a little girls night pity party. She was going through some pretty horrific relationship issues at the time. A girl’s night was just what we needed.

She was supposed to come over the next morning and help us unload the truck when he got there. But we’d been drinking, and I didn’t want her to drive. I suggested she just spend the night and already be there in the morning to help us unpack. Peter called from the road and the next fight ensued when he wanted me to ask my friend to leave. He wanted time alone with me. Of course, he still wanted her to come back later and help unpack the truck. My friend wasn’t impressed.

Of course, there were good reasons for his lack of appreciation and gratitude towards someone who was about to do him a favor, and we should understand that. All he wanted was a little time alone with me when he first arrived in his new home. Translation: He wanted to have sex as soon as he got there. Not to mention he was going to buy us sushi for lunch as a thank you. He got his way, we had the rug burns to show for it.

After listening to the argument taking place on the phone, my friend decided to leave the house and give him what he wanted. She didn’t want me upset and fighting over her being at the house. This argument set the precedent for how my friends handled my relationship with Peter. In the months to come, they would simply avoid being around, avoiding inviting me to do anything that didn’t involve him because they didn’t want to put me through the argument that would arise if they did. This ended up meaning I was pretty much isolated from my friends, because either they invited us both or they didn’t invite me, and they really just didn’t want to be around him.

Throughout June and most of July we spent half the time peacefully enjoying our new life together and the other half fighting. It was a roller coaster of amazingly high highs and dramatically low lows. Our arguments centered around me wanting him to be a responsible adult and unpack the boxes of stuff he had brought and filled the spare bedroom that was supposed to be my home office with.

We fought about me wanting him to get things done around the house and be out looking for work rather than gallivanting around a new town, taking in the scenery and going on long bike rides. He wanted time to have fun before he got a job and was working constantly. I wanted the house in order and wanted him to have a job that was bringing in money before the modest savings he had moved with ran out.

We had very different priorities. Maybe he was right. Maybe I was right. Maybe the truth lied somewhere in the middle. But no matter who was right, we were wrong together and that was starting to become abundantly clear.